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Kitty Hawk bans some movies after complaints

Despite the best efforts of Navy officials, the word “sailor” endures in expressions about excess (“drunken sailor”) and profanity (“cuss like a sailor”) — and the next entry into the vernacular could be “as offended as a sailor.”

Crew members aboard the carrier Kitty Hawk complained to the captain because they were offended by the language, gore and violence in a series of movies shown while the ship was underway, Kitty Hawk spokesman Lt. Bill Clinton said. As a result, skipper Capt. Todd Zecchin pulled three movies from the rotation, and according to some reports, he temporarily replaced them on the ship’s movie channels — with cartoons.

To be sure, it wasn’t as though viewers were upset over the subtle disquiet in the Merchant-Ivory classic “The Remains of the Day” — the films in question had also been controversial (and panned) among civilians. Clinton told Navy Times that sailors complained about “Soul Plane” — a raunchy 2004 Snoop Dogg/Tom Arnold vehicle, “Never Die Alone,” — a shoot-’em-up pairing rapper DMX with David Arquette, and “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” about a chainsaw massacre in Texas.

Crew members don’t have as much time for leisure as perhaps they would in port: The Kitty Hawk is at sea participating in a joint U.S.-Japanese exercise. Still, off-watch sailors complained in anonymous e-mails to the newspaper Stars & Stripes that “we’re all adults here” and that “they might go crazy” if they were forced into a diet of cartoons and less-intense features.

Clinton said Zecchin imposed the movie restrictions only in response to sailors’ complaints, not because of any movie preferences of his own. The Navy doesn’t censor the movies it sends to ships, but commanding officers are authorized to decide which features are shown.

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